Career plans and aspirations of recent black and minority ethnic business graduates

Gill Kirton
Additional contact information
Gill Kirton: Centre for Research in Equality and Diversity, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London, g.kirton@qmul.ac.uk

Work, Employment & Society, 2009, vol. 23, issue 1, 12-29

Abstract: While existing data now provides a fairly detailed picture of the state of the graduate labour market, less is known about the career aspirations of graduates, how and why they make the decisions they do. Based on qualitative interviews with black and minority ethnic business graduates, the article investigates the subjective dimensions of the early formation of careers.This approach opens the way for exploring the influence of `race'/ethnicity and to do so, the article employs Jenkins' (2004) sociological framework for conceptualizing identity focusing on how identity works in everyday life through three distinct `orders' — the individual, interaction and institutional. The article argues that career plans and aspirations, while not simply reflective of or determined by `race'/ethnicity, are formulated in the light of self-concepts of ethnicity that interact dialectically with awareness of a racialized, discriminatory labour market.

Keywords: career; discrimination; ethnicity; graduates; identity aspirations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0950017008099775 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:23:y:2009:i:1:p:12-29

DOI: 10.1177/0950017008099775

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().